Hero worshipping must stop

SIR: To live successfully in this country, in this present age, you have to have bore-hole, well or live on pure-water; you have to generate your own electricity; you have to build your own roads and provide strong security for yourself and the community. These are simple basic amenities to make someone live as human being in a society.

Mr. President, I believe it is high time we started turning the wheel of progress of this nation forward and fast too. The damages done to this country are so enormous that books can be written about them. In fact, many people have written a lot about them already.

However, Mr. President we shall not sit down in the woods and be crying over spilled milk, by so doing we shall continue to move backward far into the woods and never forward into civilisation. What we should do now is to start looking at the damage one by one and proffer solution to the problems.

I think we should address first our orientation as a people and as a nation. Our orientation has been so distorted that we have lost our true value as human beings. Those who have ruled the country in the past two decades have made us to believe in false sense of values.

To start with is the fact that any little development (like just a borehole in a community) by anybody in government, the people believe that “the person has tried”. Why? It is simply because the people in government made us to think that they are doing Nigerians a favour by putting in place those things. Elected public officials are in those offices to improve on the lives of citizens and their communities, states and the nation. So they are doing their assignment just as a clerk in the office is doing his/her assignment by moving a file from point A to B or a teacher going to the classroom to teach the pupils/students.

Nobody should be hero-worshipped for doing his/her assignment in office elected to occupy for a particular period.

• Olutola Fakehinde, Ota, Ogun State.